Library publishes student, faculty work from Computational Research Day

From “Mixing by cutting-and-shuffling a hemispherical shell” by Thomas Lynn ’21

How would you simulate the formation of a galaxy? What can historical voting patterns show us about polarization in the U.S. Congress? These are a couple of the research questions discussed at the annual Northwestern Computational Research Day, held on Northwestern’s Evanston campus on April 10, 2018. For the first time ever, the library has partnered with Northwestern IT Research Computing to publish this year’s conference proceedings.

“There’s a lot of really great research created by students and faculty that few people get to see,” said Chris Diaz, Northwestern’s Digital Publishing Librarian, “so we created a service to make it easier to publish conference proceedings and scholarly journals to a wider audience.”

This year, researchers presented their scholarship at a one-day symposium focusing on computational reproducibility, data science challenges, and the communication of research results. Because Northwestern Libraries provides services that showcase student and faculty research, this year’s proceedings are available online, so researchers from around the world can discover and access the posters and visualizations from this year’s event.

From “Fluid dynamical levitation of heavy particles” by Daniel Case

“This has enabled students to share their research more broadly by publishing these conference proceedings. With help from Northwestern University Libraries, Computational Research Day Poster and Visualization Competitions now can provide students and postdocs with a publication opportunity to build their CV during their time at Northwestern,” said Jackie Milhans, Research Computing Services Manager, Computing and Data Support Services.

The Poster Contest received 48 submissions and the Visualization Competition garnered 31 entries. The proceedings showcase 26 posters and 17 visualizations from a variety of subjects. Highlights include award winners from the visualization contest and the on-site poster competition. Vicky Yang’s interactive visualization shows how ideological polarization in congress has evolved over time. Alex Gurvich’s animation simulates stellar feedback and resulting galaxy formation with three varied results presented side by side. Michael Katz’s poster presents analyses of simulations created to aid in the detection of black holes during future NASA studies.

The posters have all be assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) to facilitate citation and persistent linking, and the proceedings will be archived in Arch, the library’s research and data repository, for long-term preservation and access. Participation in the proceedings was voluntary. If you’re a Northwestern looking to publish a journal or the proceedings from your research event, contact Chris Diaz.